DeLoggio Education Consulting

Selection of and Preparation for College and Professional Programs

Measuring Diversity at College

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Whether you're picking a college, a graduate school, or a professional program; whether you're doing so from within the United States or from Timbuktu, there are many more choices than you can possibly imagine.
I sometimes think that 90% of the high school students applying to college think that only the Ivy League schools are good schools, and that every good school is in the Ivy League. Of the many fallacies contained in this concept, let me list a few:

the Ivy League is a football league, containing only eight schools, seven of wished existed before the United States was formed.

It follows, then, that no state school is in the Ivy League.
None of the premier technical schools and universities – MIT, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Rensselaer – are "Ivy League" schools. However, they are undeniably elite schools.

addition to all of these schools, which are technically universities, there are over 100 highly-esteemed "liberal arts colleges;" these are schools that focus their attention on undergraduate education in the classical form. Most of them do not have law schools, medical schools, or business schools, and they may offer graduate degrees in only one or two programs.

These schools are much easier to get into than the elite universities, because most applicants have never even heard of them; yet if you are looking for an advanced degree after college, attendance at Macalester, Wellesley, Oberlin, Grinnell, or Pomona can give you as good or even better a chance at getting into Columbia University than a degree from Purdue might.

There is no way that I can list all of the good schools in the United States; I couldn't even list all the good schools in a particular subject. Do your research, and do it repeatedly, on several different levels. Use YouTube to see campuses; look for student groups on Facebook. But whatever you do, don't rely on a single source of information for such an important decision.

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CAVEAT: I ATTENDED THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA UNDERGRADUATE ON A FULL TUITION SCHOLARSHIP. ALL OF MY ANSWERS ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA SHOULD BE TAKEN AS BIASED IN FAVOR OF MY BELOVED PENN.